The ideal way to approach Mine, Adam Ouston’s second novel, might be to read it out loud in one exhausting sitting, to let its cadences roll and accumulate. This is a novel that consists of one long sentence, and thousands of clauses, digressions, conjunctions, modifications and clarifications. There is nowhere for the reader to rest.
To read Mine out loud would leave one short of breath, parched, uncomfortable, delirious – and thus in sync with its central character, a poet, activist and teacher who has tumbled to the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft in western Tasmania, and now lies in the dark.
This novel-in-a-sentence begins and ends with a howl, an urgent, pre-linguistic frequency that is “at once consoling and terrifying”. The poet is concerned with running out of air to breathe; claustrophobia, carbon monoxide poisoning, clean air rhetoric, and Tasmania’s ferocious winds and rains number among the many preoccupations of the novel’s roving consciousness.
The poet has fallen into the mine while researching ghost towns, the subject of his last great work, “a reckoning of place that had gathered slowly within him over seven decades and into an eighth, a lifetime of writing and thinking and erasing and starting over”.
He thinks of this undertaking as a “hauntology”, a reckoning with the revenant. Both the poet and the novel are concerned with lost futures, and particularly the aftermath of the rapacious exploitation of Tasmania’s mineral wealth; the novel reaches for “the secret, invisible story beneath the story, history without history, transporting, dreamlike”. The title of the novel carries the colonial prerogative to declare ownership over land and resources: “speak name own, mine”.
It’s possible to conceive of Mine as a hallucinatory work of both environmental and social history. To do so requires the reader to hold the thread of narrative tightly as the novel winds through a maze of projections, identifications, repetitions and recursions. For this is not a linear history; “the darkness had prompted a fossilisation of his [the poet’s] inner timepiece”. Meanings accrete gradually. And yet narrative coordinates do emerge: an elegy for one of the poet’s friends, an account of Mawson’s expedition to Antarctica, a memoir of the poet’s journey on an icebreaker, a visit to the ghost town of Chester. The culmination of Mine is a bravura narration of the 1912 North Mount Lyell mine disaster, in which 42 men lost their lives, an intense demonstration of Ouston’s skill as a writer that brings together the major themes and figures of the book.
I was unable to read Mine in one effortful spasm of breath and attention, just as I am not able to suspend time when I read other contemporary maximalist works whose narrators cannot or will not rest. These include Daniel Kraus’ Angel Down (2025), which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in May; Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019); Herscht 07769 (2024) by Lazslo Krasznahorkai; and Zone (2014) by Matthias Enard – all of which take the length of a novel to work through a sentence. Jon Fosse’s Septology extends a single sentence over seven volumes. But as useful as it is to locate this novel in an evolving tradition of transnational modernism, Mine is unequivocally a work about Tasmania, its brutal histories, and its maddening ecology.
This kind of writing is risky. Sections of Mine do buckle under conceptual overload and anxious multidirectional allusions. And yet what is the point of an experimental practice that is unwilling to take risks, or a maximalist novel that hesitates to cram in more ideas? Rather than guiding us along the well-tended and signposted duckboards of the realist novel, Mine requires us to cut our own track.
The novel often recalls the “Age of Exploration Tracks”, that time when “cutting parties, armed with saws, axes, scrub-hooks, picks, and mattocks, carved and blazed access trails through the unrelenting rain and eucalypt forests, which itself was like boring through rock, a day’s toil to clear five metres”. This is not a bad description of what it’s like to read Mine, at once strenuous and exhilarating.
Readers for this kind of fiction tend to be self-selecting, and Ouston has already attracted a horde of admirers; his debut Waypoints (2022) was longlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin award. Mine is altogether a more accomplished work, not least because its formal radicalism is matched by the feral political energy of the activist-poet at its heart. The vitality of this expression of contemporary Australian modernism is grounded by the jeremiad against the exploitation of labour and the environment in Tasmania; as the poet reflects, “‘it was staggering what some people did and allowed to be done to something so precious”.
Mine by Adam Ouston is out now (Transit Lounge, $34.99)
